Replication Data For: The Impact of School Finance Reforms on Local Tax Revenues

Starting with the California State Supreme Court decision in Serrano v. Priest (1971), state supreme courts in the United States have invalidated school finance systems that relied primarily on locally funded property taxes, holding that such schemes deny low-income students’ constitutional rights to equal protection under the law (Sullivan 1977).<br>To comply with these court rulings, state legislatures enacted new policies for funding school districts that prioritized equity in school funding across districts, during the first wave of reforms, with later reforms requiring adequate levels of funding across school districts (Lafortune,Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018). <br><br>Whereas the effect of these reforms on equalizing school spending has been widely studied—for example, Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2016); Card and Payne (2002); and Hyman (2017)—less attention in the literature is devoted to understanding how they affected both the tax base and the incentives of local school districts to increase property taxes to fund schools. Notable exceptions are Hoxby (2001) and Hoxby and Kuziemko (2004).<br><br>In this paper we show how these reforms can be used to generate plausibly exogenousvariation in local property taxes. Our hope is that other scholars can use these instruments to answer important research and policy questions at the intersection of public finance and education in economics, where having an instrumentfor local taxes is advantageous.